


only minutes to go 'til the sun sets

by amaanogawa



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Light Angst, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mentions of Blood, delinquent au, kuroo waxing poetics as per emily amaanogawa brand, mild violence, the tags sound kind of ominous but it's just a lot of emotions and nothing else dw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-16 01:40:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19308049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaanogawa/pseuds/amaanogawa
Summary: Oh, fuck.Kuroo thinks, because despite lying bloody on the dirty city streets, Sawamura Daichi is the most beautiful thing Kuroo has ever seen.I’m in love with him, aren’t I?As if on cue, Daichi twitches violently, his body jerking up before he starts to gasp for air.“Motherfucker,” Daichi wheezes, shock evident all over his face as he pushes himself up onto a shaky elbow. “Did I just fucking get shot?”





	only minutes to go 'til the sun sets

It happens in an instant, so quickly that the moment passes Kuroo by before he can even think of reacting. As the leader of Nekoma he’s known for his uncanny instinct and quick reflexes, but those skills seem to elude him as he stands, lips parted and wide eyed, as Daichi’s smiling face disappears from his sight from one heartbeat to the next. 

The sound of a gunshot, the smell of blood in the air, the stifling humidity of Tokyo’s summer against his skin,  _ Daichi’s smiling face _ — 

Time hangs still in the air long enough for Kuroo to properly feel these things right down to the hollows of his bones, and then everything catches up all at once as things seem to do. In the next second Daichi clatters to the ground, yelling starts and then blurs into the background as the others take off down the road to chase after the shooter, and yet all Kuroo can do is stare. He watches the blood— _ Daichi’s blood _ —pooling slowly onto the asphalt, filling the cracks in the street like a macabre painting before he finally comes to his senses.

“Sawamura,” he croaks weakly, crouching to tap the back of his hand against Daichi’s sweaty cheek. “Hey, Sawamura. C’mon, don’t die on me.”

His heart is pounding so hard that he can feel the blood rushing in his ears, and for a moment his mind wanders to the worst case scenario. Kuroo realizes, right then and there, in some cliche revolutionary discovery of a lifetime, that somehow he doesn’t want to—no,  _ can’t _ —imagine future days without Daichi close by. That Kuroo’s life had undeniably changed for the better from the moment Daichi fractured three bones in his hand upon first meeting. Nekoma and Karasuno had clashed like an explosion and then unified to become something greater, which is all Kuroo had managed to fool himself into thinking that this was. 

Silly. In what world does the  _ unification _ of two gangs have the power to bestow stars within someone’s eyes? There’s no such force present on this earth other than that which Daichi has had this entire time. 

_ Oh, fuck.  _ Kuroo thinks, because despite lying bloody on the dirty city streets, Sawamura Daichi is the most beautiful thing Kuroo has ever seen.  _ I’m in love with him, aren’t I?  _

As if on cue, Daichi twitches violently, his body jerking up before he starts to gasp for air. 

“Motherfucker,” Daichi wheezes, shock evident all over his face as he pushes himself up onto a shaky elbow. “Did I just fucking get shot?”

“Yeah.” It might as well be Kuroo who was shot with how close he feels to passing out. He tugs his black face mask down past his chin, subtly trying to suck in deeper breaths through his nose to keep himself conscious. “You sure did, dude.”

With a grimace, Daichi sits himself up against the concrete wall and lifts his shirt gingerly, revealing a nasty gash along the side of his abdomen. Despite the amount of blood, as far as bullet wounds go it’s probably about as good as one can hope for. 

“Just grazed me. Kid’s got shit aim, I’ll say that much. Not that I’m complaining.” His laugh is forced and misplaced with how pale his face is. “Give me something to stop the blood, will you?”

Kuroo fumbles to rip the sleeve off of his white t-shirt, swallowing hard at the way Daichi’s blood seeps through the fabric when he presses it to the wound. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

“It’s not that bad. Give Suga some floss and a needle and he’ll have me good as new.” It won’t do for Daichi to be the one who’s reassuring Kuroo, but hell if his hands aren’t shaking from where they’re pressed up against Daichi’s side right now. This kind of fear is so uncharacteristic he can’t even begin to understand it himself. After all, they’ve all been in worse situations before—hell, the four inch long scar running down Kuroo’s forearm from when he’d met the wrong side of a knife still throbs on rainy days. That  _ did  _ require a stint in the hospital, and Daichi was by his side then as well, albeit significantly more level headed and calm than Kuroo could ever be right now. 

And that’s just it, isn’t it? Daichi’s the type to get shot and try to reassure others instead of sparing the concern for himself. Kuroo never stood a chance from the start.

“What’s wrong with you?” Daichi nudges Kuroo’s arm with his elbow, brows raised. “You’re making a face like I’m already dead.”

Kuroo shrugs, tripping over his words for an eloquent answer. After all, how does he explain to his rival-gang-leader-turned-friend that he just realized, post-gunshot, that he’s been in love with him for probably the better part of a year? How does one go about expressing that kind of emotion? The weight of this knowledge is near impossible to contain, because Kuroo has never been blind to how expansive Daichi’s shoulders are—in a way that is far greater than just its physical breadth.

(Though, Kuroo admits, the latter in itself is more than impressive enough.) 

He carries the world within his palms, calloused and scarred with years of victory and loss alike. Kuroo has always known, but knowing it and coming face to face with losing it are two very different things. After all, no one thinks that Atlas is capable of falling until the moment the heavens come crumbling down around them, raining ash and lost time from the skies like confetti. 

“I’m not good with blood.” Of all things,  _ that’s _ the explanation he ends up going with, to which Daichi raises his brows incredulously.

“Kuroo. You’re the leader of one of the most notorious gangs in the country. Your job is to be good with blood.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m just not good with  _ your  _ blood.”

“You didn’t seem to have a problem when you gave me a bloody nose and a broken rib when we first—“ 

The tail end of Daichi’s sentence is cut off by a sudden shriek as Tanaka, Fukunaga, and Yamamoto round the corner, dragging a terrified kid who can’t be more than 15 years old by the collar. The kid is still struggling with all his might, tears streaming down his face with the remnants of what looks like vomit on his cheek when they throw him to the ground at Kuroo’s feet.

“Looks like they’re resorting to sending a kid to do their dirty work,” Yamamoto spits, an edge of disgust to his voice. “Can’t even shoot a gun without hurling his guts out in fear.”

“P-please,” the kid chokes out, moving to kneel in front of Kuroo. He doesn’t say anything more than that, but a strangled sob tumbles from his lips as he lowers his forehead to the ground. Kuroo doesn’t reply immediately, simply keeps his eyes on Daichi who is staring back at him questioningly, face pale and pinched with pain. 

Kuroo almost lost him just now. The thought is impossible to make amends with. 

“ _ Please _ ?” He echoes softly. He wants so badly to cup Daichi’s cheek, feel the warmth of Daichi’s skin under his fingertips—which would undeniably be to reassure himself more than the wounded, but that kind of intimacy has no place here. “You come into our turf, attempt to murder the leader of Karasuno, and now you’re saying  _ please _ ?”

The anger in his veins is thunderous, striking and striking within him until he feels like his bones are shattering on impact. Kuroo could incinerate the air around him with how uncontrollable his blood lust is in this moment. When he stands, Yamamoto, Tanaka, and Fukunaga know well enough to quietly slink away out of his sight. His hands are covered in Daichi’s blood, staining the air around them with the smell of copper and loss and for a moment Kuroo is struck with the fear that this inferno will burn him alongside everything he wants to protect. 

_ Rein it in.  _ He sucks in a deep breath through his teeth, clenches his fists by his side and tries to ignore the tacky feeling of half-dried blood settling into his palm lines. 

“Do you mean to start a war?” Kuroo smiles, simply because he doesn’t know what he would do if he didn’t, baring his teeth at the kid whose tears are falling one by one onto the pavement beneath his knees. “Shall I carve a warning into your skin and send you back to whatever hole you crawled out of?”

The boy squeaks in fear but doesn’t dare raise his head, except Kuroo doesn’t have the time to spend on fear tactics for some no name kid clearly sent as a sacrificial lamb. They need to get Daichi back to Sugawara and Yaku as soon as they can, and though Kuroo doesn’t necessarily have a penchant for violence despite the line of work they’re in, as the leader of Nekoma he can’t allow their territory to be breached and for the perpetrator to walk away unscathed. He moves to pull his switchblade out from his pants pocket, swiping at the button to release the knife with a quick flick of his thumb. There’s no shortage of blood on his hands—figuratively and literally—but he can’t help but feel like he loses a part of himself every time he has to do this. One day maybe he’ll cross some unspoken line and finally scatter to pieces into the wind, but  _ until then _ —

“Wait, Kuroo.”

Daichi’s voice is like a single sunbeam cutting through the dark, and Kuroo lifts his head, looking back at Daichi feeling oddly like a man who has long fallen from grace seeking his last chance at redemption. He realizes then that the only thing worse than being a criminal who’s scared of hurting people is to be a human who has gone numb to it all—because knife in hand, Kuroo struggles to find a single wisp of humanity left that makes him worthy of looking Daichi in the face. 

“Don’t waste your breath,” Daichi says finally, his lips fish belly blue and cracking at the edges. “He’s just a pawn, anyway.”

Whatever Kuroo was expecting him to say, it wasn’t that. 

“What are you saying, Sawamura? Has the blood loss gone to your head?” The words come out stinging but Daichi doesn’t waver. “Pawn or not, he’s an enemy.”

“I’m fairly sure the kid has realized he’s in way over his head. He won’t survive if he returns to his group in piss soaked pants anyway. There’s nowhere left for him to go.”

No. Kuroo doesn’t know what could possibly be going through Daichi’s mind right now but he can’t let this continue. If word ever got out that Nekoma and Karasuno had shown this kind of scene—one of  _ mercy _ , they’d be opening themselves up to any number of vulnerabilities in the future. In this world the only way to survive is to through fear, and the only way to spread fear is through  _ reputation _ . 

“Yamamoto. Tanaka. Take Sawamura back to the base first.” Kuroo turns, fingers curling over the handle of his switchblade as he stares down emotionlessly at the thing grovelling on the pavement in front of him. This is a means to an end, only that, and he’ll do what needs to be done. He has  _ always  _ done what’s necessary. 

“Kuroo,” Daichi murmurs.

His voice sounds too much like forgiveness that Kuroo doesn’t deserve. 

 

—-

 

By the time Kuroo is allowed to enter the room, Daichi is sitting up in bed and looking much more alive than he had hours earlier. His shirt is off, displaying stark white bandages wrapped neatly around his torso, padded heavily with gauze where the bullet had grazed him. 21 stitches, Sugawara had said. Daichi didn’t so much as flinch. 

He’s staring out the window, making for a breathtakingly glorious sight as the setting sun illuminates the curves of his face—they look softer like this, not the face of a criminal nor a man with bloodied wolf’s teeth and jagged glass eyes, but just  _ Daichi _ . 

And god, he is beautiful.

Kuroo takes the moment to stare, because it’s something he knows he can’t get away with it when Daichi is looking back at him. The sunlight streaks across Daichi’s profile and sets him alight, from the burning smoulder of Daichi’s eyes to the obsidian feathered wings etched into Daichi’s skin. The winged tattoo starts from his right shoulder blade and engulfs his shoulder, splaying out onto the right side of his neck all the way to the middle of his arm and over his pectoral. Just one wing. Kuroo wants desperately to press his fingertips to it, trace each feather with wonder, worship him like Atlas so deserved.

_ Don’t fall.  _ It’s a silent plea for the Titan and all that he must bear, without even a second wing to set him free.  _ The heavens are too heavy a burden, I know, but _ — 

“Hey,” Kuroo says, and he hates how tenderly his voice comes out but it makes Daichi smile when he turns, and for that it’s worth everything. He reaches to smooth out the blanket on the space beside him with his palm, inviting Kuroo to sit. 

“Hey yourself.” Daichi doesn’t say anything more after that but peers at Kuroo knowingly, allowing the room to lapse into silence as if he could tell Kuroo needed a moment to find his words. Their dynamic has been like this from the very start—that is, after they stopped trying to kill each other—and it hasn’t ever been something that Kuroo has felt the need to pick apart. 

Daichi ebbs and Kuroo flows, and then Daichi pushes and Kuroo relents. Like a dance, something as natural breathing, and as surely as the sun and moon pull tides with the sheer force of their combined gravity.

Kuroo loves him. Oh, he loves him. 

“I used to dream about getting out, you know. Of… _ this _ .” The sudden admission takes Daichi aback for only a second before his shoulders slacken and his face softens into something Kuroo has long forgotten how to recognize. Sympathy, maybe. No, more than that—it’s understanding. After all, there isn’t any need for a leader to be understood, only respected. It’s a lonely seat at the top, but if there were anyone who could understand how Kuroo feels, Daichi would undeniably be the one.

(He’s  _ the one _ in more ways than just that, of course, but Kuroo digresses.)

“No one gets into this life because they had a choice,” Daichi says softly, and though they both know it’s a bad idea, his hand finds its way to Kuroo’s and Kuroo can’t find it in himself to pull away. 

“In the beginning, when it was just Kenma and I—we would talk about opening our own cat kennel.” Kuroo lips quirk up in the corners, his voice as far away as the distant memory. “We were two brats doing whatever we could to survive. Theft, maybe. Petty stuff. It was possible to get out. I still have all these shitty blueprint drawings of our kennel hidden away, as if I’m still clinging on to that silly childhood dream at this point. Pathetic, right?

“But then as the years went by, our pack grew. First Kai and Yaku, then Fukunaga and Yamamoto, then Lev, Shibayama, and Inuoka. And the more members we got, the more we had to protect, and it’s not just petty crime anymore. We’ve all got blood on our hands now. There’s no way to get everyone out, and I’m not about to leave any of them behind. This might not be the life I thought I wanted but I don’t regret any of it, Sawamura, because from it I found my family. Not the shit excuses for parents that I came from, but a real family. Everything that I did to survive led me to them.”

Kuroo takes a breath then, gathers his courage as best as he knows how, and looks up into Daichi’s eyes. Whatever he was expecting to find falls short in the wake of entire pools of molten amber—warm and kind and so, so beautiful. It’s a mystery how it took a gunshot for Kuroo to finally realize the one thing that had been right in front of him this whole time because in this moment, or maybe all along, he could drown in nothing but the depth of Daichi’s eyes without fear and be none the wiser. 

“It led me to you,” he says, squeezing Daichi’s hand with trembling fingers. 

This is as close and he has ever gotten to crossing the vast distance between him and Daichi. There is little room for such sentiments for people in this life, in their positions, and to have a weakness means one more way for others to steal what’s yours. All this time Kuroo has only thought about protecting his own, and Daichi doesn’t fit anywhere within that intent. 

“I decided to stay for my family, and it’s not something I chose lightly. I’m  _ in _ this now, and I can’t let anything— _ anyone _ —get in the way of that.” The words feel like weights on his tongue but Daichi doesn’t look surprised to hear them. He’s smiling, of all things, a small and rueful smile that has Kuroo gripping at his hand with all the desperation of a drowning man. “Sawamura, what I did today—“

“What I made you do,” Daichi corrects, and Kuroo is falling, falling,  _ falling _ —

“I let him go,” Kuroo whispers. 

Daichi closes his eyes, his lashes fluttering shakily against his cheek. “I’m sorry, Kuroo.”

“Why did you stop me?”

A gossamer flash of hesitation appears and disappears from Daichi’s expression as quickly as it came before he looks away, a heavy sigh escaping his lips. His other hand tenses where it rests against the bed sheets, bunching the fabric between his clenched fist until his knuckles turn white.

“You made this face,” he says quietly. “I can’t explain it. Suddenly you felt really far away somehow, and at the time I had the feeling that if I let you go, I’d never get you back. It terrified me.”

The notion of anything  _ terrifying _ Sawamura Daichi is nearly unbelievable, really—an unbreakable pillar that holds up the very sky, a pivoting point around which the celestial heavens orbit. Daichi is a storm of a man who has thunder in his veins, steel bones with barbed wire skin and such a man never bares his neck. In spite of all this, Kuroo is struck—no,  _ humbled _ —with the reminder that no matter how mighty, at some point all storms will inevitably quell its rage to reveal a soft day. Daichi’s face is so very soft, so very vulnerable in this moment, fingers clutching at the bed sheets, his amber eyes wide.

“Don’t go where I can’t follow, okay?” He whispers, just a little desperately.

Even the splintering sound of Kuroo’s heart shattering around the edges is drowned out by how deafening Daichi’s lips are against his when Kuroo pulls him in with a single motion, fingertips curling against the nape of Daichi’s neck with his eyes squeezed shut, and the last thing he can think to do is beg time to stop, if only for the chance that they can stay in this moment just a little longer. 

A few moments to an eternity exist right there between the two of them, and in that infinity Kuroo finds the humanity he thought he’d lost when the first drop of blood had spilled at his feet for the sake of his found family, all that time ago.

“I’m right here,” Kuroo murmurs, too scared to open his eyes and look at Daichi properly. “I’m not going anywhere.”

This kind of intimacy, this kind of weakness has no place in such a blood spattered world, one where children are sent as lambs to the slaughter armed with nothing more than a gun they don’t know how to use in hand. It’s an ugly, cruel world that Kuroo can no longer shield his eyes from, because he knows he has long become ugly within it.

In this moment, just between the two of them exists an eternity that passes them by in delicate, fleeting seconds. Kuroo isn’t so daft to miss how this contradiction is about as blatant as a tempest existing within tranquility.

And yet Daichi is right there in front of him, isn’t he? Contradiction be damned, Kuroo presses forward and accepts it all. He presses forward, feeling wetness on his eyelashes and warmth on his lips as he wonders if Daichi’s fingertips contain magic within them, on top of having wolf’s teeth and jagged glass eyes and tempestuous tranquility in his lungs.

It must be magic, right? 

Because under the unbearable lightness of Daichi’s fingers on his cheek, Kuroo almost feels whole again.

**Author's Note:**

> emily amaanogawa? posting something? sounds like fake news.
> 
> PS: daichi stepped in front of the bullet to shield kuroo. kuroo didn't notice and daichi would never tell him so it's not in the fic, but now you know.
> 
> [my tumblr](https://amaanogawa.tumblr.com) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/amaanogawa_)


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